Posts Tagged ‘web 2.0’

Yes, we’re really motoring now and part of the social revolution. (the) health informaticist has joined Twitter and hopefully, with a little bit of luck, this story will automatically get posted to our new page – I’m just so looking forward to clicking “publish” to find out if it works or not. Do please follow us. No really, please…

TechCrunch and TechCrunchEurope both written by lots of different people, frequently updated and with a good mixture of new developments, product reviews and more in depth debate. Not very health informatics but definitely web 2.0

Its All Good A blog from five OCLC staff about all things present and future that impact libraries and library users. A bit of everything library related.

PubMed Search Strategies A highly specialised use of the group blog format. Brilliant sharing tool for no cost but a little time.

BoingBoing Regular items from Cory Doctorow (and others) on copyright / IP and plenty of library love mixed in with all manner of interesting stuff from the web and beyond. Once got me summoned to my managers office to explain what I was doing looking at website with the url boingboing.net – answer trying to read an item on censorship only to find it blocked by websense.

So over to you… Do you group blog? Which ones do you read? What makes a great group blog? And have you ever had a disaster through participating in one?

I went to a really interesting LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) meeting last week about transliteracy. What is transliteracy? I’ve blogged at LIKE so take a peek to find out! They use Posterous to post via email, very intriguing…

We welcome submissions on any aspect of medical librarianship / health informatics. We particularly welcome blog posts that take a view on the role of professional organisations in the future of the profession (in the light of the Defining our Professional Future work currently underway at CILIP).

A sort of twitter shared Google buzz was launched this week, I certainly noted it had started without my input with someone eagerly waiting to follow my updates. Oh well, nothing is free as an interesting documentary on the consequences of not paying for web services The cost of freeexplored. The cost of gmail is that when you email or search for anything this data is fed into marketing and you are targeted according to this information is all well and good if it’s stuff that’s useful but it delved into the case of a woman whose identity was figured out by looking at the searches she did which included her friends’ health problems so the old nugget of freedom v privacy.

The iPad may make ebooks interesting but this has knock on effects for the print industry. Paul Carr on TechCrunch says we’re back to the days of the Net Book Agreement as publishers struggle to scrape profit from something that more and more is becoming like the music industry.

Scientific publishing will be here long after Facebook & Twitter

Hey, I found something on Twitter and thought I’d share it here. How’s that for a criteria of success? @WoodsieGirl, who herself found it through @bengoldacre, linked to a very interesting article by Michael Clarke on the Scholarly Kitchen entitled “Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?” It asks the very valid question that, given the world of web 1.0, let alone web 2.0, you’d surely have expcted expensive scholarly journals to have long since disappeared, and that instead scientists would be blogging or tweeting their results, or something. Many still predict it in fact, about how Facebook and Twitter will revolutionize scientific communication. But the web hasn’t changed anything yet, at least nothing substantial, so why do we expect any social networks to change the world of science now? Michael raises some very important points that, I think, go a long way towards explaining the longevity of the scientific publishing model, and no, peer-review isn’t one key among them. Take a look. It’s a good reminder of how technology will change nothing if the culture of a community ain’t interested…

So I’ve decided to try twitting, in tweeter. I’ve not got anything to say and will have to decide at some point what I want to get out of tweeting. I mean, is it a way of allowing far off friends to keep a handle on what I’m doing (do they care), should it have a professional slant and try and get followers in the library world, or should I just try and entertain by offering wry, sidelong glances at the little follies of being a commuter in London. Not that I’ve necessarily the talent to do any of these things, but one needs a strategy however talented or talentless one is, doesn’t one? Still, my twitter user name is, rather originally I think, “alanlovell”: http://twitter.com/alanlovell.

Anyway, the point is that I’ve downloaded this smashing little app called TweetDeck. I suspect everyone knows about it, but in case you don’t it’s a nice little downloadable free program with a cute user interface that allows you to login, read, post etc tweets, in a much more manageable way than if you were doing it online via the Twitter website. It also allows you to do the same thing with Facebook. I’ve not liked logging into Facebook now for a long time, just because the whole thing seems messy and unsettling to the finer me. But now I can keep up with the singularly useless but occasionally amusing things a select group of my friends are getting up to; it’s the genuine social networking possibilities of Facebook without having to log and navigate through the flippin’ thing.

So that’s TweetDeck for you, and from looking around I see there are other cute apps out there for you if you’re a tweeter, such as Seesmic, Twittelator etc – for Windows, Macs, iPhones etc etc – and I do wonder, is it the cute apps that are the real attraction of Twitter? Maybe I’m just following the wrong people? Who should I be following, by the way? Any must reads in the information world? At the moment I’m following a few friends, some cricketers and cricket commentators, and the obvious ones such as David Mitchell, Stephen Fry, Jimmy Carr etc. I tried the Guardian for a while but just got bored with being sent links after links after links. I want to filter the information that gets to me, not just find another route through which I can get drowned by it.

Well, anyway, happy new 2010 all. I’ll try and blog a bit more this year (been a very poor few months – work has, honestly, been very busy…).

p.s. is there a way we can set up an ‘auto-updated’ (the) health informaticist twitter account one wonders? Hmm?